Nas: ‘Part of me didn’t want to record posthumous Amy Winehouse duet’

The rapper contributed to a track called 'Like Smoke' on the late singer's 'Lioness: Hidden Treasures' album

Nas has said that he wasn’t totally sold on the idea of recording the posthumous duet with Amy Winehouse which featured on the late singer’s Number One album, ‘Amy Winehouse Lioness: Hidden Treasures’.

Nas made the comment while ‘in conversation’ with his former manager Steve Stoute at SXSW last week. Speaking about the track ‘Like Smoke’, on which he made a guest appearance, he said, via Billboard: “Part of me didn’t want to do the song.”

He continued: “Amy and I share a birthday, so she was my sister. And she was just so much fun to be around. She would say things about well-known people in the industry that she didn’t like and it would just crack me up… We were all hoping she would pull through and come back.”

When the album was released in December of last year, he had said: “It’s a bittersweet feeling to do something with her now that she’s not here. I’m happy… the sweet part is that we do have the music, fans have new music from her.”

During the SXSW discussion, Nas also said that he had begun to feel like the genre of hip hop was ‘dead’, years before releasing his 2006 album ‘Hip Hop Is Dead’.

He said: “At some point I felt the whole thing was dead after Biggie and [Tu]Pac were killed [in 1996 and 1997]. Once I knew we’d never get a chance to see where they were headed, it just died for me for a bit there.”